Clouds Tutorial

[rdrake]

Here's my own method I came up with earlier.

1) Open a new document any size.

2) Set your foreground colour to white, and your background colour to #006DBA.

3) Filter -> Render -> Clouds.

4) Filter -> Artistic -> Fresco with these settings:


5) Press CTRL + U and use these settings:


6) Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur with these settings:


And here's what I came up with:


There's probably a few better methods of doing this, I like this one.

[Paul]

oh... so thats how u do it, thanks, + bits

[JayLo]

But isn't it obvious? (there's a literal clouds filter. why bother?)

[rdrake]

JayLo wrote:

But isn't it obvious? (there's a literal clouds filter. why bother?)

It doesn't usually turn out too good though. If you want clouds like in the attachment, then just use the filter. I don't really like those ones though.

[Genesis]

One of the easier ways I like to do it is like this:

1) Make a new document. Set the foreground colour to something around 0178B0 and the background colour to something around 25AFE9. Make a new layer. Select the Gradient tool. Change it 'Forground to Background' and drag a radius that will give you a "sky" that fades from lighter to darker blue.

2) Make a new layer. Reset the colours. (Hotkey 'D') Render clouds. Then render difference clouds three times. Then adjust the levels to something around 30, 1.00, and 110.

3) Duplicate the clouds layer. Go to Filter > Stylize > Extrude. Set the Extrude settings to Type: Blocks, Size: 2 Pixels, Depth: 30 Level Based, and check Solid Front Faces. Hit OK.

4) Change both of the clouds layers to 'Screen'. Apply a Gaussian blur of about 2 or 2.5 to the second clouds layer. (The one you extruded.)

5) Make a new layer on top of all the others. Select a brush that has a fuzzy edge and set the Opacity to 100 and the Flow to 10. Start brushing shadows on the edges of the clouds to make them look 3d. (Dont worry if they look like crap right now, or if they go off the clouds, that will be fixed later.) Look at my example for an idea of what to do.

6) While on the layer with the fake shadows you just brushed, go to Select > Colour Range. Select an area of the image where there's no clouds. Change the Fuzziness to 120. Click OK and a selection should appear, hit delete.

7) Change the opacity of that fake shadows layer to 40 or so. You can use a fuzzy eraser with low flow to touch up the shadows if they still don't look right.

8) Make one last layer on top, using the same brush, but a bit larger, do a little bit of brushing in the center of the clouds. Then apply a guassian blur of 10 or 11 to that layer, and change its opacity to around 50.

That's all. Seems long, but it's really not. You'll find ways to make it better I'm sure, this is just a basic walkthrough kinda thing.

Here's a quick example I made for the sake of showing how it should turn out, though I hope yours looks better:



(The brushing here wasn't done very well. But like I said, it's just a quick example.)

This isn't the best way, but it's simple, and turns out pretty cool I guess.

[Amailer]

OMG!2!#
Damm this, what the hell is wrong... I never seen this topic again, same with some topics in GD. DAMMIT.

Either way, awsome tutorails, good to see people are posting *looks at amailer...*

+10 for cartoon_shark
+5 for Genesis -> why, 5, well iunno. Don't wanna give out 10 to two people in a day. really.

[Mazer]

Take it easy Amailer, it was just posted yesterday.

[Amailer]

Yeah, but it isn't the first time. More like the 10th or so *sigh*. alll useless topics in the spam are fine... i think firefox PR is messed up...

[barney]

This is just a quick thing I made using cartoon_shakr's cloud method.. well part of his method. Hope ya like it!